


slow dancing at the end of the night

by who_won_the_race_back_home



Series: she said we're doing pretty good if we can just get out alive [2]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Drunk Sex, F/M, Slow Dancing, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 12:15:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13271265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/who_won_the_race_back_home/pseuds/who_won_the_race_back_home
Summary: Cheap whiskey, cheaper beer, and Sara's unexpected fondness for Hank Williams help her and Rip feel a little less lonely.





	slow dancing at the end of the night

The only problem Rip had with the old phonograph was having to get up every three minutes to change the record over. He loved its tinny, scratchy, terrible sound, the hiss of white noise over the songs. It reminded him of his favorite missions–working to find time spies in Paris during World War II, fighting gangsters armed with future weaponry at the height of Prohibition. Times when it was easy for him to discern good from bad, when it was simple, and be a hero.

It had been a very long day. They had traveled to 2175 in an attempt to stop time pirates from stealing future technology and trying to make millions of it in 2150, or wherever in the slightly distant past they had decided on. That’s what most time criminals were up to, just trying to make a quick buck. Rip couldn’t count the number of times the Time Masters had to stop thieves from trying to steal the original iPhone and bring it back to 1999 to become tech billionaires.

Unfortunately, the mission took the team to London, and it had been like walking through a graveyard. Much of the city was still rebuilding after the events of 2166, and while they had clearly come a long way, there was still a long ways to go. Rubble had been pushed into neatly arranged in piles all over the city,the reminder of the violence and destruction never quite out of eyesight. He had passed by a wall still covered in crude fliers, pictures of the missing and dead. Mostly dead. Many had faded over the years to the point of being unreadable, but a few still looked new. Some still had hope, or more likely, utter delusion.

So today he couldn’t bear the thought of getting up every three minutes to flip over the damn records. He had pulled out a remaster from the days of the brief vinyl resurgence in the early 2000’s and put it on a more contemporary player. This way he’d get a whole twenty minutes to wallow in his low, leather chair.

Once he had piloted the Waverider back to the temporal zone, Rip excused himself immediately, under the pretense of needing to investigate where their next jump would be to. But instead, he had hid himself away in his office, half a bottle of very cheap whiskey picked up from a liquor store on the way back to the ship in, listening to Robert Johnson reinvent the blues. He closed his eyes and sank further back into his chair, willing himself to melt through it, out through the bottom of the ship, into a no man’s land of time and space and cease to be.

“You know one of my favorite things about this place? The fabricator puts labels on the beers, so you have something to pick at while you drown your sorrows. It’s a real nice touch. Thanks Gideon.”

Rip turned to the doorway and found Sara leaning against it, drinking from a beer bottle, another unopened one in her other hand. She looked soft, or maybe it was just tired, rumpled in black joggers and a white undershirt, hair piled messily on top of her head. She clearly had been drinking for a while. Not that she was alone in that.

“It is just a facet of my programming Miss Lance, but you are welcome,” Gideon replied in her usual cheerful manner.

Sara laughed, a bright thing that Rip too rarely heard. It was a nice sound, a brief break from the melancholy he had thoroughly cultivated for his evening.

“I think you missed your calling, Gideon. Rip, they got comedy robots in the future?” she asked after taking another long swig of her beer.

But then Rip sighed heavily, knowing that it was going to be near impossible to get her to leave at this point, and that he was stuck with her for the foreseeable future.

“I don’t know Sara, I haven’t spent much leisure time there. Perhaps,” he said, already exasperated.

“Psshhh, Gideon, you should blow this pop stand and go to 2237 and make it big. Just gotta promise to cut me in 10 percent,” she said, her head tilting up towards the ceiling as if to get Gideon to here her better.

“I will take it under consideration, Miss Lance. Thank you for your vote of confidence.”

“Anytime, Gideon. Anytime.”

Sara threw a thumbs up back towards the counsel in the middle of the bridge and went over to sit on Rip’s desk in the corner of the room. She suddenly cocked her head towards the record player,realizing it had been playing this whole time.

“What the fuck are you listening to?” she said, making a pained face. “A detuned radio from 1807?”

Rip ignored her hyperbolic inaccuracy, knowing she was baiting him into getting frustrated. “Robert Johnson. He’s the father of blues and rock and roll as we both know them.”

“Well is he why all rock music sounded like ass in 2016? Cause this sounds like ass,” she said, making another face.

“I traveled back to 1935 once just to hear him play on a street corner in a tiny town in Mississippi. It was transcendent,” he said, ignoring her and trying to remember the sound, but it was just out past his reach in the drunken fog. “Sadly he died just a few years later, when he was only 27.”

“Same.”

“He was truly one of the most talented musicians to ever live. Certainly one of the most talented I ever took the opportunity to hear. Allegedly sold his soul to the devil for the ability to play guitar like that.”

“That isn’t so special. I lost my soul and then got it back, beat that guitar man,” she said, fiddling with the sextant on his desk that had been given to him by James Cook.

Rip rubbed at his temple with his free hand and fought the urge to snatch the instrument from her like a child. Dealing with a drunk and probably a beer away from belligerent Sara Lance had not been his plan for the evening.

“Sara, what do you want?” he asked.

“Well, we were doing this whole misery loves company thing, but Ray’s a fucking lightweight and bailed after two beers and Mick just passed out on the kitchen table in the middle of telling me about a sick heist he and Len did in 2011. Although, I guess to be fair, he had been drinking since this morning.”

“And?”

“Annddd I have had about six of these,” she said, waving her almost empty beer. “And by myself I will start thinking about my sister and Snart and all the ways I am a fuck up. So I am here to bother you instead, because I knew you lied to us and weren’t planning a mission.”

“I don’t know if I will be much help then,” he said, lifting his half full glass at her. “As you can see, I am doing well enough in my own misery. So, if you’ll please leave.”

Sara softened for a moment, looking him over–slouched low in his chair, still in his clothes from the mission, leather jacket thrown haphazardly behind him, boots unlaced but still on his feet. A look of what felt like concern, or maybe pity, washed over her face.

“Do you even sleep in your bunk anymore?” she asked.

“Ah, anymore implies that I had been in the first place,” he said with a weak smile.

The record finished and the hiss of unpressed vinyl played over the speakers. Rip moved to get up and switch it over, but Sara beat him to it, taking the album and actually putting it back in the sleeve, setting it aside with the others. She glanced quickly over his small collection, but the look on her face suggested she wasn’t finding what she wanted.

“Can’t believe you don’t have any Hank Williams,” she muttered “Gideon, can you play some Hank Williams?”

“Sara, Gideon’s not a jukebox,” he protested.

“It’s no problem, captain. Senior, I assume?”

“You got it, Gideon. Thanks.”

“I’m So Lonesome” piped in from overhead and Sara tapped her foot along to it. It was certainly an unexpected choice from her. But then again, Rip supposed he didn’t know very much about her outside the context of their job. That had been on purpose, despite Ray’s repeated insistence that they weren’t just a team, they were a family. And ever since the destruction of the Vanishing Point, Rip had tried to be less detached, to be friends with his team. But it was a hard habit to break after years of only Gideon as his constant companion.

“Dance with me, ” Sara said.

“What?” Rip replied, snapping out of his daze.

She walked over to him, hand held out in an invitation.

“Rip, just fucking dance with me.”

Rip took her hand and let her pull him up out of his chair. Draping her arms over his shoulders, she led them in an offbeat sway, just out of time to the music, like two drunken teenagers at a school dance.

“I guess you weren’t joking when you said you weren’t much of a dancer,” he said, perhaps more seriously than he intended.

Sara knocked him lightly in the head and gave him a stern look. He nodded his head in apology.

“I would not have thought you to be a big country music fan,” he continued.

“I’m not. Not really. My dad would play this stuff all the time when I was little. He called it his sad bastard music, and then said I could never tell my mom he used that word in front of me,” she said, trying to sway a bit more steadily than he was, likely out of spite. “Of course, like, a week later, they got called into the school because I kept calling Jeremy Laurins a bastard. Which, even though I didn’t know what it meant then, he totally was.”

Rip cracked a smile, imagining a tiny Sara, terrorizing her grade school classmates with taunts. It was not a difficult image to conjure.

“Ah, see. I knew I could trick you into a smile,” she said, poking at the corner of his mouth.

Another song began to play, and Rip attempted to gently spin Sara, but they both got tangled and he gave up, chuckling and taking her waist back in his hands. She leaned her head against his shoulder and they danced quietly to Hank Williams’ warble.

“How old are you?” she asked after a few minutes.

“I’m not entirely sure,” he said after a moment. Sara lifted her head to look at him, curiosity on her face. “I’m fairly certain I was born in the first half of the twenty-second century, but the Time Masters made sure birth records of all their captains were destroyed. Not even my mother was informed of when I came from. It was safer for everyone. Though I suppose it mostly just made it easier to manipulate us.”

At this point they were barely moving, just holding each other in the middle of Rip’s office.

“Time didn’t work linearly at the Vanishing Point, and I haven’t aged in a way that makes any sort of sense. Gideon says that physically, I’m roughly 35, but I have worked enough years to at least double that.”

“That’s fucked up,” Sara said, not missing a beat.

Rip laughed, full throated, in a way that he hadn’t in what felt like years. It startled him, and Sara, from the way she jumped a bit when the noise escaped him.

“Yes, it quite is, isn’t it? I’m sure Karl Marx would’ve have a field day with that one, the bourgeois doubling worker productivity by stopping linear time,” he said through his chuckling.

“I don’t even know how to respond to that.”

The song ended, and in the brief moment of quiet before “Cold Cold Heart” began to play, he kissed her, sloppy and drunk. She tasted like the terrible beer from the fabricator. They were never quite able to get the program right to make anything better. She was malty and a little sweet, much better than the beer itself. But he pulled back almost as quickly as he went in, suddenly realizing what he had done.

“Sara, I’m sor–”

Without hesitation, Sara wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and cut him off, catching the end of his sentence in her mouth. He took her hips and walked her back so he could hold her against the wall of his office.

Rip had thought about this more than once over the past few months. And the guilt brought him to the point of nausea. He knew that Miranda would want him to move on, not to be a man metaphorically dressed in black forever mourning his departed wife. But it still felt so fresh. Time was a construct that he had broken and put back together so many times, he had no idea how long ago she and Jonas had actually died, because it was always just a quick time jump away.

And he still felt that guilt twinge in his subconscious now, pressing Sara up against the wall, her teeth biting at his lower lip and soothing with her tongue. But the glasses of cheap whiskey had dulled the ache of loss, made it easy to ignore, and replaced it with a want low in his gut.

Kissing down her throat, he stopped to nip at a spot near her collarbone. He felt himself begin to get hard at the low moan she made, and he pressed his hips against hers seeking friction. Hands were at the button of his trousers and before he realized what was happening, she had already slipped under the waistband of his boxer briefs, cupping him over the jockstrap that held his packer in place. She pushed his pants down just enough to get a better look at the white band and straps running down under his thighs.

“Fuck that’s hot,” she said, moving a hand underneath it to touch him.

He put his hand on hers to still it.“I’d–I would rather you didn’t,” he said.

Sara moved his hand to her ass, and her own back up to his neck. “You can just say no, it’s okay.” She kissed him slow. “Just means you can fuck me now.” Her mouth breathed hot over his ear. “Please.”

Letting the whiskey in his system push his more rational thoughts away, Rip moved his hand underneath the waist of her sweats and pulled her towards him. She hooked a leg over his hip and ground against his leg, asking for more contact. His hand slipped over to her cunt, touching experimentally, and her hips stuttered against him, wanting.

“I need more than that, Rip,” she said, bucking a bit harder against his fingers.

A blush rose on Rip’s cheeks over the way she said his name, but luckily she either didn’t see or was kind enough not to comment on it. He pushed her joggers down just enough to get a better angle and slid into her, the kiss they were in the middle of halted as he began fucking her, his hips behind his hand, moving in time, adding pressure.

Sara was quieter than he thought she would be, small whimpers with every thrust of his fingers. Not that he would have admitted to having thought about getting this far, being inside her, holding her up against a wall while she arched against him. He ducked his head against her neck, pressing his mouth against the skin there while he worked his hand in a steady rhythm, thumb pressing sloppy circles against her clit. Her hands grasped at his back, seeking leverage to get the angle she needed.

Her sighs got higher pitched and breathier as he felt her getting close, until she went quiet and her back arched high and hard. Rip took a moment to look at her as he worked her through her orgasm, and she was beautiful, disheveled in this way. But then again, she was always beautiful, his inhibitions were just rarely lowered enough to allow himself to really appreciate it.

Rip slowed his fingers as she came down, using his free hand to help keep her upright, easing out of her as her breathing became more regular. Her lips pressed against his jaw, a quick nip of a kiss, before meeting his mouth, long and slow, teasing him a bit.

“You’re pretty good at that,” she said, pulling her joggers back up over her hips.

“Thank you?”

“No, thank you.” She kissed him again, tucking her hands underneath his unbuttoned shirt.

They stayed like that a few moments longer, kissing slowly as Hank Williams continued to play overhead. Sara’s hands ran through the hair on the back of his head, and he felt a fondness he hadn’t experienced in a very long time.

“Come to bed with me Rip. I wanna see that jockstrap of yours,” she said with a devilish grin and a palm grabbing his ass. His hand rubbing small circles at her hip froze.

“I–I don’t–” he stuttered.

She smiled wide at him and Rip quickly realized that it was a dangerous gesture that would only lead to trouble. And that it could probably get him to do almost anything.

“I’m kidding about the jockstrap. For now anyways,” she said with a wink, the only person who could pull that off and not look ridiculous. “Lets go to bed and sleep. Like normal people who travel through time and sleep in beds.”

Sara took his hand and tugged him gently in the direction of the door. Rip paused, looking at the tattoo on her wrist, running his thumb over it, trying to give himself a moment to overthink this. Feeling his hesitation, she pulled away from him, grabbing the bottle of whiskey from the table next to his chair and her unopened beer from his desk.

“Listen, I’m not saying this is probably a good idea, but I’ve certainly had dumber ones, and it’s better than you sleeping in that chair. So c’mon.”

She walked out of his office with a glance over her shoulder. He hesitated only for a second before following right after.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Lucero's "Slow Dancing." Their whole Tennessee album inspired this fic, and if it isn't just back to back anthems for Rip/Sara, I really don't know what is.
> 
> You can find me at angrypedestrian.tumblr.com for all your cowpunk related Rip/Sara feelings.


End file.
